Skip to main content

Home/ Gaming and the liberal arts/ Group items tagged writing

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Brett Boessen

Why I Blog - Andrew Sullivan - The Atlantic - 4 views

www.theatlantic.com/...307060

Sullivan atlantic blogging opinion

shared by Brett Boessen on 29 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • For a long time, columns were essentially monologues published to applause, muffled murmurs, silence, or a distant heckle. I’d gotten blowback from pieces before—but in an amorphous, time-delayed, distant way. Now the feedback was instant, personal, and brutal.
    • Brett Boessen
      Brett Boessen on 29 Oct 12
       
      Instant Feedback -- blogging is the gamification of authorship?
  • The form was more accountable, not less, because there is nothing more conducive to professionalism than being publicly humiliated for sloppiness.
  • The blog remained a superficial medium, of course. By superficial, I mean simply that blogging rewards brevity and immediacy
  • ...26 more annotations...
  • the key to understanding a blog is to realize that it’s a broadcast, not a publication. If it stops moving, it dies. If it stops paddling, it sinks.
  • But the superficiality masked considerable depth—greater depth, from one perspective, than the traditional media could offer. The reason was a single technological innovation: the hyperlink.
  • in reading it on paper, you have to take the columnist’s presentation of the material on faith, or be convinced by a brief quotation (which can always be misleading out of context).
  • a hyperlink to the original source transforms the experience.
  • A blog, therefore, bobs on the surface of the ocean but has its anchorage in waters deeper than those print media is technologically able to exploit.
  • The blogger
  • a node among other nodes, connected but unfinished without the links and the comments and the track-backs that make the blogosphere, at its best, a conversation, rather than a production.
  • If you compare the meandering, questioning, unresolved dialogues of Plato with the definitive, logical treatises of Aristotle, you see the difference between a skeptic’s spirit translated into writing and a spirit that seeks to bring some finality to the argument.
  • Perhaps the greatest single piece of Christian apologetics, Pascal’s Pensées, is a series of meandering, short, and incomplete stabs at arguments, observations, insights. Their lack of finish is what makes them so compelling—arguably more compelling than a polished treatise by Aquinas.
  • Montaigne was living his skepticism, daring to show how a writer evolves, changes his mind, learns new things, shifts perspectives, grows older—and that this, far from being something that needs to be hidden behind a veneer of unchanging authority, can become a virtue, a new way of looking at the pretensions of authorship and text and truth.
  • To blog is therefore to let go of your writing in a way, to hold it at arm’s length, open it to scrutiny, allow it to float in the ether for a while, and to let others, as Montaigne did, pivot you toward relative truth
  • Some e-mailers, unsurprisingly, know more about a subject than the blogger does
  • The role of a blogger is not to defend against this but to embrace it.
  • He is similar in this way to the host of a dinner party. He can provoke discussion or take a position, even passionately, but he also must create an atmosphere in which others want to participate.
  • You can’t have blogger’s block. You have to express yourself now, while your emotions roil, while your temper flares, while your humor lasts. You can try to hide yourself from real scrutiny, and the exposure it demands, but it’s hard.
  • Alone in front of a computer, at any moment, are two people: a blogger and a reader.
  • The proximity is palpable, the moment human
  • friendship
  • Bloggers can be spun and misled as easily as traditional writers—and the rigorous source assessment that good reporters do can’t be done by e-mail. But you’d be surprised by what comes unsolicited into the in-box, and how helpful it often is.
  • A good blog is your own private Wikipedia.
  • There is a distinction here, of course, between the edited use of e-mailed sources by a careful blogger and the often mercurial cacophony on an unmediated comments section. But the truth is out there—and the miracle of e-mail allows it to come to you.
  • The reason this open-source market of thinking and writing has such potential is that the always adjusting and evolving collective mind can rapidly filter out bad arguments and bad ideas. The flip side, of course, is that bloggers are also human beings.
  • You can disappear into the partisan blogosphere and never stumble onto a site you disagree with. But linkage mitigates this. A Democratic blog will, for example, be forced to link to Republican ones, if only to attack and mock.
  • If all this sounds postmodern, that’s because it is. And blogging suffers from the same flaws as postmodernism: a failure to provide stable truth or a permanent perspective.
  • To use an obvious analogy, jazz entered our civilization much later than composed, formal music. But it hasn’t replaced it; and no jazz musician would ever claim that it could. Jazz merely demands a different way of playing and listening, just as blogging requires a different mode of writing and reading.
  • The reason they talk while listening, and comment or link while reading, is that they understand that this is a kind of music that needs to be engaged rather than merely absorbed.
  • Bryan Alexander on 30 Oct 12
     
    Good one, Brett. Some people were talking about social media as gamification, in terms of checking points (hits, links) and getting rewards. Can't remember where.
  • Brett Boessen on 31 Oct 12
     
    If you think of it, drop me a line; I'd be interested to see what came of that discussion.
Brett Boessen

Terra Nova: Movies Stink - 15 views

terranova.blogs.com/...movies-stink.html

rant castranova systems design games narrative stories storytelling

shared by Brett Boessen on 06 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • Brett Boessen on 06 Jan 12
     
    Castranova is not usually so passionate in his writing.  Very interesting perspective, though.
  • ...12 more comments...
  • Bryan Alexander on 06 Jan 12
     
    Interesting to see him split games from stories.
  • Bryan Alexander on 06 Jan 12
     
    I do chime in with his grumpiness about Hollywood, generally.
  • Brett Boessen on 07 Jan 12
     
    Honestly, I'm starting to feel similarly. Though I am finding many of the long-form serial narratives of TV pretty engaging. Still, I appreciate the value in *doing* over watching/consuming. And yet what he's saying is essentially a version of the old "film/tv makes you passive" argument, which I've always recoiled against. So I'm torn.
  • Bryan Alexander on 10 Jan 12
     
    I've been coming back to the tv=passive line, more and more each year. It's hard, because I know so many active fans engaged in all kinds of practices. But then I see the silent fans, the ones who just... soak. And I'm reminded of William Gibson's line about couch potatoes.
  • Brett Boessen on 11 Jan 12
     
    I don't know that one...do tell. :)
  • Bryan Alexander on 11 Jan 12
     
    I think this is textually correct, more or less: "a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed. Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth, Laney, no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections."
  • Bryan Alexander on 11 Jan 12
     
    Or, more succinctly: couch potatoes, like taters, are kept in the dark, buried under manure.
  • Brett Boessen on 12 Jan 12
     
    Wow. That's...very detailed. Doesn't leave a lot of room for empathy or understanding: pretty cut and dried. :)
  • Bryan Alexander on 12 Jan 12
     
    Jeremaiad. One I sympathize with. I need to spend time with you happy media studies folks and regain my old empathy.
  • Brett Boessen on 13 Jan 12
     
    THAT Camp - Games. Done and done. :)
  • Bryan Alexander on 13 Jan 12
     
    That's right - when do you arrive?
  • Brett Boessen on 13 Jan 12
     
    I'll actually be there Thursday evening, but I'm going to dinner with my parents and brother (who live in the area). I am staying through Monday morning, though. We should be able to find some time to catch it, I'd guess. What are your travel plans?
  • Bryan Alexander on 14 Jan 12
     
    Coming in Thursday, leaving Sunday @3.
  • Brett Boessen on 14 Jan 12
     
    Cool -- I'll see you Friday morning then. Let's try to grab a meal at some point. :)
Ed Webb

Fun Inc: Why Games Are the 21st Century's Most Serious Business by Tom Chatfield | Book... - 1 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...fun-inc-games-tom-chatfield

gaming games book review socialscience

shared by Ed Webb on 02 Apr 10 - Cached
  • Fun Inc.: Why Games are the 21st Century's Most Serious Business by Tom Chatfield 288pp, Virgin Books, £11.99
  • games might involve a lot of effort, but the payoff is that "effort is always rewarded".
  • elf-and-safety roleplayer World of Warcraft
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • First, games are interesting in themselves, as constructions of space, logic and ideas (games are "a kind of playground for the mind"); second, they are interesting in their potential effect on other realms.
  • he possibility of using gamelike structures to produce empirical results in the social sciences
  • Chatfield's emphasis on games' fecund variety, on the other hand, will be valuable to non-specialists: he writes evocatively not just about Grand Theft Auto but about indie gems such as Passage, where your quest is meaningless and you die after five minutes. His comparison of videogames to installation art, meanwhile, is striking, and he even manages to make World of Warcraft sound interesting – though his awed description of a particular sword as being "the length of a full-grown orc" is rather lovable nonsense to someone who doesn't know how long orcs grow.
  • "the best games are a trigger for discussion, reading and writing – not an end to it"
  • Ed Webb on 02 Apr 10
     
    games might involve a lot of effort, but the payoff is that "effort is always rewarded".
Ed Webb

The Ballad of Reedybeanz - reedybeanz (grab_bag) - Echo Bazaar [Archive of Our Own] - 1 views

archiveofourown.org/73011

games gaming fantasy steampunk fallen_london echobazaar fanfiction

shared by Ed Webb on 23 Apr 10 - Cached
  • Ed Webb on 23 Apr 10
     
    Nicely done. I wonder about fan fiction as a writing form for liberal arts education. Potential to engage reluctant writers?
Ed Webb

Kill Screen - Folk Game Story Corner: The Game With a Hat - 2 views

killscreendaily.com/...olk-game-story-corner-game-hat

games

shared by Ed Webb on 29 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • Ed Webb on 29 Apr 11
     
    Simon Ferrari now writing for Kill Screen. Entertainment likely.
  • Brett Boessen on 30 Apr 11
     
    Awesome. Think I'll play this with my Games class next Friday; maybe we'll use game titles instead of celebs. And I'll be sure to pretend I'm thick if one of my neighbors gets too far ahead of me on points. (Also, am glad Kill Screen exists.)
Bryan Alexander

Bringing new life to a 'dead' language | News Center | Wake Forest University - 0 views

news.wfu.edu/...ng-new-life-to-a-dead-language

gamification pedagogy

shared by Bryan Alexander on 22 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Bryan Alexander on 22 Apr 13
     
    Published: April 19, 2013 Role-playing game energizes Latin class Choose your character, write spells, map the dungeon and move up levels. It sounds like Dungeons and Dragons, but it's not. It's Latin class. Each student plays a hero from Graeco-Roman myth with a backstory, personality and actions determined largely by the student.
Ed Webb

Rats in a cage: how games will teach us to love the police state | The Verge - 3 views

www.theverge.com/...ge-gaming-and-the-police-state

games gaming dystopias

shared by Ed Webb on 04 Jul 13 - Cached
  • Bryan Alexander on 20 Jul 13
     
    I wonder what an overall survey of all current offerings from the gaming industry would reveal. Index each game along a continuum from Big Brother to V for Vendetta.
  • Ed Webb on 20 Jul 13
     
    If I get tenure, I might just write that article.
  • Bryan Alexander on 20 Jul 13
     
    Yeah! Would be fun for a class project, too.
Bryan Alexander

The evolution of the analyst: turning tactical analysts into strategic thinkers - 4 views

paxsims.wordpress.com/...alysts-into-strategic-thinkers

simulation pedagogy collaboration

shared by Bryan Alexander on 18 May 12 - No Cached
  • Bryan Alexander on 18 May 12
     
    The post below is courtesy of Tom Fisher of Imagenetic simulations, who writes about his recent work developing a simulation for use in training financial intelligence units in strategic analysis.-RB I knew we were on to someone when, mid-course, a student approached me with a problem. Tom, we've got a problem.
Brett Boessen

Press Start to Continue: Toward a New Video Game Studies | HASTAC - 3 views

hastac.org/...-toward-new-video-game-studies

games criticism hastac pedagogy theory forum

shared by Brett Boessen on 08 Feb 12 - No Cached
Erik Hanson liked it
  • being a gamer is less an inherent attribute—either you are or you aren’t—than it is a malleable description of practices that change throughout one’s lifetime, whether from “hardcore” to “casual,” single-player to “social,” or genre to genre
  • one could argue that part of the origin story of game studies was the struggle to establish the idea that games are not narratives--that they were a radically "new" textuality, but this just delayed the needful discussions of how games related to the inherited media ecology, how they used narrative, music, video, etc. to new effects
  • students tend not to be "well-played," on an analogy to "well-read," but knowledgeable in one or a few genres
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • what about our students' physical abilities and skill sets? How does skill play into their experiences of games?
  • Can or should one philosophize about a medium one has not embraced to the point of design?  I vote:  no.
  • In an academic paper, I don't think that I would feel legitimate in citing something from a designer. It doesn't feel credible, even though the designer may be someone like Ron Gilbert
  • a senior-level seminar in “Digital Games and Culture”
  • Betty Hayes and I have been teaching an undergrad games studies course uniting new media reading/writing, academic readings across disciplines, and gameplay across genres for two years now
  • Brett Boessen on 08 Feb 12
     
    HASTAC has started a forum (a blog post with lots o' comments) to discuss video game studies.
Ed Webb

MMO Monopoly launched on Google | Gaming Ghouls - 0 views

www.gamingghouls.com/...mo-monopoly-launched-on-google

games gaming googleearth mmorpg monopoly

shared by Ed Webb on 09 Sep 09 - Cached
  • A new way to play Monopoly will be launched today on Google; Monopoly City Streets is a MMO where players use Google Maps as the game board to buy up property and try to become the richest one of your friends. The game is supposed to be launching today however at the time of writing this the site has not gone live.
Brett Boessen

On Authorship in Games - Click Nothing - 5 views

clicknothing.typepad.com/...on-authorship-i.html

ebert games art criticism blog post

shared by Brett Boessen on 14 Jul 10 - Cached
  • interacting with a work does not shape the work, it ‘only’ reveals it.
    • Brett Boessen
      Brett Boessen on 14 Jul 10
       
      Well put.
  • Because a game is a complete formal system
    • Brett Boessen
      Brett Boessen on 14 Jul 10
       
      Is he implicitly arguing here that games with emergent elements -- especially MMO's and games with heavy player-vs-player interactions -- are not games, or is he arguing that they also represent "complete formal system(s)"? Or did he simply misspeak? Because I don't see emergence as falling within any kind of closed system.
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 09 Aug 10
       
      I take him to be talking about elements that belong to the game proper, not to things that might emerge within and through the game as a result of player interactions. So in-game actions are part of the game. Forums for player discussion, clans etc are not part of the game, at least not part of the authored game. But I agree, it's very ambiguous and should be debated.
  • The rebuttal to this argument lies in a comparison to film or to music or to any other collaborative artistic creation.
    • Brett Boessen
      Brett Boessen on 14 Jul 10
       
      Woops -- I thought he was going to address my points above, but he went in a different direction here. (I'm enjoying the point-by-point-rebuttal structure of the post immensely, though. I'd love more of my students to write this way. :)
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 09 Aug 10
       
      I agree. The noise point is quite good. And careful comparisons with other media are useful.
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • The Argument from Legitimacy
    • Brett Boessen
      Brett Boessen on 14 Jul 10
       
      He rocks this entire section -- well done.
  • “I believe art is created by an artist. If you change it, you become the artist.”This is a much easier point to tackle simply because there is a fallacy in Ebert’s argument. He is implying that interacting with a work is the same as changing it. But this is not true. My ‘paint’ is not ‘what the player does’. My paint is ‘the rules that govern what the player can do’.
    • Brett Boessen
      Brett Boessen on 14 Jul 10
       
      Agreed. Ebert probably should have read Bogost's Persuasive Games before he started all of this.
  • the audience must always interact with a work on some level
  • The artist is also capable of creating an entire expressive system space that explores a potential infinity of different notions
  • Where most other media require the audience to induce their meaning, games afford the audience at least the possibility of deducing their meaning.
  • GTA: San Andreas on the other hand – which I played for a good 100 hours or so, gave me such a world transforming view of racial tension and inequity in early 1990’s California, that I have been shaken to the core, and have been forced to re-examine a huge part of my world view.
  • while there can be an art of expression in the way someone reveals the art, this does not necessarily diminish the art in the design of the work itself
  • There is noise in these systems too – some of it comes from the collaboration of others, and some of it comes from random noise
  • Many filmmakers, from Taratino to Inarritu to Haggis and dozens more have been increasingly attempting to explore stories from multiple angles in an attempt to mimic – in a medium severely limited for this purpose – what games can do innately
  • Ebert is wrong for two important reasons
  • there is authorship in games, no matter how much we abdicate
  • I will accept Ebert’s roughly stated thesis that art requires authorship
  • Because a game is a complete formal system, the entire possible range of outputs from those systems is determined by me
  • how do you know you are able to express your thoughts and feelings in the design of interactive systems’
  • I know because I understand it. What I am expressing makes sense to me both intellectually and emotionally. If others do not understand it, it is not really a question of whether I am expressing myself, but rather one of whether I am expressing myself clearly
  • The next argument is whether or not it is, in fact, true that the entire possible range of outputs from a games’ systems are really determined by me
  • The next argument would be that audiences cannot reconstruct the meaning I intend them to by way of interacting with systems
  • Another argument against the existence of real authorship in games is the argument about the legitimacy of the kind of authorship I am talking about. In his responses to Barker, Ebert says:“If you can go through "every emotional journey available," doesn't that devalue each and every one of them? Art seeks to lead you to an inevitable conclusion, not a smorgasbord of choices.”
  • The final argument that I see remaining is the one that asks ‘who is the artist here anyway?’ Ebert says:
Bryan Alexander

Learning the art of creating computer games can boot student skills - 2 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...100121101124.htm

gaming pedagogy

shared by Bryan Alexander on 25 Jan 10 - Cached
  • Bryan Alexander on 25 Jan 10
     
    Computer games have a broad appeal that transcends gender, culture, age and socioeconomic status. Now, computer scientists think that creating computer games, rather than just playing them could boost students' critical and creative thinking skills as well as broaden their participation in computing." id="metasummary
  • Ed Webb on 26 Jan 10
     
    I totally agree. But from my experience having students write interactive fiction in a senior seminar, this is a very time- and resource-intensive way to impart those skills. Not sure it is doable as part of a broader course. Perhaps a full course in game design is yet another thing to add to the stack of basic literacies in the general curriculum...
  • Bryan Alexander on 26 Jan 10
     
    Perhaps thinner and/or lighter projects would work better. Thinner: spread the work even further across a class. Individual projects ->groups, groups ->whole class. Lighter: even easier to use tools. Inform is pretty easy, though...
Ed Webb

Home : Inform - 1 views

inform7.com

writing interactive inform programming tools simulation games

shared by Ed Webb on 06 Jun 11 - Cached
  • Ed Webb on 06 Jun 11
     
    New home of Inform 7 interactive fiction platform
  • Bryan Alexander on 06 Jun 11
     
    Very different presentation. Thanks, Ed.
Bryan Alexander

Special Issue of Syllabus: Teaching with and about Games - 1 views

www.syllabusjournal.org/...1168

gaming games pedagogy

shared by Bryan Alexander on 22 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Bryan Alexander on 22 Feb 15
     
    TABLE OF CONTENTS EDITORIAL Special Issue: Teaching with and about Games Video Game Studies How to Play Games of Truth: An Introduction to Video Game Studies Novel Interfaces for Interactive Environments Educational and Serious Game Design: Case Study In Collaboration Introduction to Games Design Representing the Past: Video Games Challenge to the Historical Narrative Learning Through Making: Notes on Teaching Interactive Narrative Video Games as a New Form of Interactive Literature Writing In and Around Games Hints, Advice, and Maybe Cheat Codes: An English Topics Course About Computer Games Teaching Network Game Programming with the Dragonfly Game Engine Root of Play - Game Design for Digital Humanists Alternative Reality Games to Teach Game-Based Storytelling "Continue West and Ascend the Stairs": Game Walkthroughs in Professional and Technical Communication Annotated Bibliography for Game Studies: Modeling Scholarly Research in a Popular Culture Field
1 - 15 of 15
Showing 20▼ items per page